Archive for the ‘Civil liberties’ Category
How is anyone surprised by the Democrats?
Saturday, March 9th, 2013Liberal commentators all around the internet, both professional and amateur, were fuming earlier this week in response to Sen. Rand Paul's filibuster to block the confirmation of John Brennan for CIA director. But interestingly, many of them weren't going after Paul but rather were expressing disappointment and shame at liberal ...
The coming ban on semi-automatic rifles
Monday, December 17th, 2012I expect Congress and President Obama to pass some form of ban or stricter federal law against semi-automatic weapons and/or "assault rifles" in the next few months. I'm sure many Americans strongly support such a ban now, after the Sandy Hook Elementary School murders, if they didn't before. It's easy ...
David Brin on freedom, governments, and the internet
Sunday, December 9th, 2012In his post A Threat to the Internet as We Know It, science-fiction author, scientist, and futurist David Brin writes about the recent United Nations summit and the threats to internet freedom that it portended: A United Nations summit has adopted confidential recommendations proposed by China that will help network providers ...
Greenwald on the deification of Democrats and villification of Republicans
Monday, December 3rd, 2012Glenn Greenwald's column Obama: a GOP president should have rules limiting the kill list must be my favorite political writing that I've read in years. It expresses why I'm so frustrated and fed up with liberals and their Democratic politicians better than I ever could have, so I'll just quote ...
Greenwald on free speech restrictions
Thursday, October 18th, 2012Throughout history, it has often been the case that today's "hate speech" becomes tomorrow's enlightenment. Today's "incitement" becomes tomorrow's righteous subversion of unjust authority and flawed orthodoxies. Add to all that the ignoble tendency to object to—or even recognize the existence of—repression only when it affects one directly...and it's clear that ...
As expected, CISPA will pass and violate our online privacy
Friday, April 20th, 2012It's sad but not surprising to see that the successor to SOPA, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA, H.R. 3523), is gaining support in the House of Representatives and seems likely to pass there. I had little doubt this would happen, but the quickness with which Congress has ...
Quote of the day
Saturday, February 4th, 2012The very same faction that pretended for years to be so distraught by Bush’s mere eavesdropping on and detention of accused Terrorists without due process is now perfectly content to have their own President kill accused Terrorists without due process, even when those targeted are their fellow citizens. —Glenn Greenwald, on ...
Maybe free speech is less popular than I thought
Friday, February 3rd, 2012I had a bizarre experience yesterday: I encountered two people who were wrong on the internet who asserted that words can harm people and so their (mis)use should be punishable by law. I don't mean using libel or slander to harm someone's reputation, which should not be considered crimes anyway. ...
PCIPA: another internet-censoring, privacy-violating bill that goes overboard
Wednesday, February 1st, 2012I was impressed by this article in The Atlantic by Conor Friedersdorf about the Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers Act of 2011 (PCIPA), The Legislation That Could Kill Internet Privacy for Good. This article was written on August 1, 2011, and apparently the bill, H.R. 1981, is almost a year ...
How long will the SOPA protests be successful?
Sunday, January 29th, 2012In my more cynical moods, I think that Westerners' complacency in political and economic matters and their comfort levels with life in general will make their recent victories against internet censorship mere footnotes to the history of State encroachment into our online lives. In other words, lawmakers, lobbyists, and other ...
Links for an ending week
Friday, January 20th, 2012President Obama deserves praise for opposing the SOPA/PIPA bills in the House and Senate, respectively, but, of course, in true Republocrat fashion, deserves further criticism for qualifying that with, "That is why the Administration calls on all sides to work together to pass sound legislation this year that provides prosecutors ...
Hypocrites silent as Obama authorizes military detention of American citizens
Monday, January 2nd, 2012One of the most unfortunate aspects of America's democratic process and its current state here at the beginning of 2012 is the nearly compete absence of discussion of some central issues by most people, along with their failure to acknowledge that those issues even exist and their complete hypocrisy regarding ...
Stop the Stop Online Piracy Act!
Saturday, November 12th, 2011The latest attempt from the parasites in Washington to limit the freedom of the internet and all of the benefits that stem from it is called the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). Its more official, full name is Enforcing and Protecting American Rights Against Sites Intent on Theft and Exploitation ...
The existence of the TSA is the point
Monday, July 4th, 2011You might have read or heard about this story from Florida in which a 95-year-old wheelchair-bound woman was required to remove her adult diaper to be inspected by the Transportation Security Administration last month. You might not have heard that the 95-year-old woman was actually calm and acquiescent during the ...
Bin Laden reaction roundup
Sunday, May 8th, 2011I have been much more interested in the various and sundry reactions, mainly from Americans, to Osama bin Laden's killing than to the news itself. The whole situation ought to inspire quite a bit of mixed feelings from any libertarian, and even from any sensible, sympathetic human being. Notwithstanding the ...
End-of-the-month links
Saturday, April 30th, 2011Amazon.com's cancellation of its plans to open a South Carolina distribution center and high-tailing it out of town because the state legislature voted against giving the company a tax exemption are interesting from a libertarian perspective for a couple reasons. First, from a principled anti-tax standpoint, this is one of ...
Government-enforced net neutrality
Tuesday, February 1st, 2011The only part of the phrase "government-enforced net neutrality" that is relevant is the "government-enforced" part. There are so many arguments against the position that the Imperial Federal Government should enforce net neutrality that I had a hard time knowing where to begin. They include: Most problems with cable companies ...
Julian Sanchez on politically motivated suppression of WikiLeaks
Saturday, December 11th, 2010I really enjoyed Julian Sanchez's entire post Wikileaks and "Economies of Repression", but the conclusion was the best: In the heady days of the 1990s, it was widely assumed that the global Internet was, by its nature, an anarchic zone of untrammeled speech inherently immune from the control of governments quite ...